The Charm of Beauty is to Win Hearts

Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain the background and interesting aspects of the paintings. People walked about in a hushed reverence. Some had a look of awe and wonder on their faces. Then it hit me: art museums today are secular cathedrals. Modern culture has largely jettisoned God, but the longing for beauty cannot be removed from our souls. Tom Wolfe said in a lecture, “Today art . . . is the religion of the educated classes.”…